Collecting Data

Here's what I know about data:
     1.  Data makes the marketing business go 'round.
     2.  Data is kind of a pain to collect.
     3.  Data can give us a picture of what has happened and what we can expect.
     4.  Data can help direct our resources.

So here's some data on the bazaar:

               Vendors               Customers           Sun. Sales            Total Sales

2007            23                           ?                          ?                          $6,813

2008           29                          175                     $1,570                 $6,354

2009           28                         230                        $206                 $6,976

2010           30                          313                       - - -                      $9,818

2011            33                          304                       - - -                    $11,100

2012           28                          367                      - - -                       $13,081

2013           30                          360                      - - -                      $13,386

So you get the idea.  You can see that we hadn't even considered collecting data the first year other than how many vendors and how much money.  But we wanted to know more.  We had our greeters tally the number of people who came - by the hour!  That info helped us when we extended the hours two different years.  And Carolyn kept a spread sheet of the money each day. 

More about what the data meant to us in my next post.